[Whips up Dobbin.

* * * * *

KOCH SURE!

SCENE—­A PLACE OF MEETING.  ENTER BROWN AND JONES.  THEY SALUTE ONE
ANOTHER.

Brown (excitedly).  Have you heard the good news?

Jones (stolidly).  What good news?

Brown.  That Dr. KOCH has at length revealed his secret?

Jones (startled).  No, has he!  Dear me!  And that I should have missed so pleasant a piece of intelligence!  And so he has told an anxiously-expectant world the cause of his success!  Can you explain the matter to me?

Brown (cheerfully).  With the assistance of the Public Press, to be sure I can.  See here, I will give you the solution to the problem, as told by the Journals, “without puzzling technicalities.”

Jones.  I hang upon your words with an impatience that politeness—­the outcome of civilisation—­alone renders endurable.

Brown.  Then you must know that Dr. KOCH has discovered that the remedy for tuberculosis consists of a glycerine extract of a pure cultivation of tubercle bacilli, the local effect of which, when injected into a healthy guinea-pig, produces a nodule found at the point of inoculation, which, when a second puncture is perpetrated, causes what may be called the bacillary fluid to be brought into the current of its circulation, so that the infected tissue may react upon the agent which it had previously been able to resist.  I am not quite sure that I have got the exact words, but that’s the idea.  Simple, isn’t it?

Jones.  Very! [Exeunt severally.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  “WORSE THAN EVER!”

FARMER SMITH.  “TUT-T-T! TWO OF ’EM! BAD ENOUGH WHEN THERE WAS ONLY
ONE!!”]

* * * * *

DOMESTIC MELODIES.

(BY SANCHO PRESTON PANZA.)

WINTER BATH-SONG.

  For weeks the sun each morn arose
    As ’tis his nature to,
  But little difference he made
  Sopp’d by the fog’s asthmatic shade;
  From day’s beginning till its close
    The day no brighter grew. 
  Above the sheets, the sleeper’s nose
    Peep’d shyly, as afraid,
  While ’neath the dark and draughty flue
  The burnt-out cinders meanly strew
  The hearth, where now no firelight glows,
    No waiting warmth is laid.

  Full many a morn I sprang from bed,
    As o’er the deadly brink
  The wretch, with courage of despair,
  Leaps from the slimy river-stair,
  By hopeless hope unthinking sped,
    Ere he can pause to think. 
  Cold as the efforts of the dead,
    The needle-atom’d air,
  Impinged upon the limbs that shrink. 
  On shivering shanks, and eyelids pink,
  And bound its bands about the head,
    And chill’d the underwear.